PharmiMike

Following on a discussion I was having recently about measuring your SEO success with regard to Search Engine ranking, here is an interesting article from Jill Whalen of High Rankings, saying don’t bother!

• Rankings are constantly fluctuating
• Personalized search
• Rankings don’t equal targeted traffic
• Rankings don’t equal conversions or sales

Read the full article here: SearchEngineLand

Now here’s an interesting thing… I was recently looking at Google’s Insight tool. If you dont know, its a tool that allows you to look at search trends over time, and against keywords from 2004 onwards. So, I dropped in “Pharmaceutical Jobs”… expecting to see a steady rise in the numbers of people entering that keyphrase into Google. But, guess what, its actually fallen, and fallen quite dramatically, to 45%  of what it was at the start of 2004.

Google Insights for "Pharmaceutical Jobs"

So then I typed in “Pharma Jobs” and its the opposite story although not quite as dramatic.  So why is that?

My guess would be that:

1. people are increasingly familiar with pharma as the acceptable abbreviation of pharmaceutical
2. more people realise that searching for something as broad as pharmaceutical jobs, doesn’t really narrow their search. Indeed, the number of people who land on PharmiWeb.com as a result of that search is actually pretty small, even though we rank #3 on Google.

Interestingly you can also see that annual variations in search that mirror pretty much exactly, the traffic on PharmiWeb.com. That is, busy in January and around August, dead over Christmas, so I suspect this is pretty universal.

So have a play on the insight tool and you will see that more specific searches are rising, and also that geographically some areas like India are increasing significantly. Use that information when planning your SEO and your adword campaigns too.

One aspect of Bing that seems to have been overlooked by many is the RSS (yes I’m still obsessed). You can create an RSS feed for ANY search, simply by putting “&format=RSS” on the end of the search string. Thats pretty damn powerful.

So if you want to keep tabs on a particular topic then you can run a query and create an RSS for your feedreader. You can so a similar thing too with GoogleAlerts too.

Lets assume for example I want to keep track of “Pfizer”.

http://www.bing.com:80/news/search?q=pfizer&go=&form=QBNR&format=rss 

Simple. You can of course also use that as a news feed on your site. You do of course get a lot of rubbish returned, but hey, its free.

Its  a pretty obvious question, but assuming that you know what words or phrases you are hoping to be found under, its a very important one. Where are you in the Great Google. (other search engines are useful too). Because without knowing, you don’t know if you are getting better or worse in the search engine rankings

I use a great plugin tool from SEOBOOKS called Rankchecker. Its a plugin for Firefox and allows you to run a query against search terms on 4 or the main search engines. Personally I normally focus on Google.co.uk, but it will search google.com,  yahoo and MSLive too.

How to Check your ranking on Google (and Others)

Its a free plugin and only takes a few moments to run  and stores its results in a cumulative spreadsheet so you can see changes over time for your chosen keywords. You can also schedule it to run on set time intervals. Not very sophisticated, but a very useful (and free) tool!

This is pretty important! but very simple. Its also only a very small step in a long journey! 

Simply go here  and enter the URL of your site.

Submit your site to google

But before you do that there are a number of checks you should do :

• Do you have a basic sitemap (a simple navigation method) ?
• Is your website search engine friendly?
• Do you have a Robots.txt file?
• Do you have a sitemap.xml file?

If you want to submit your site to BING, there are a few steps to go through.

How to Submit to site to Bing

1. Go to this URL if you want to submit your website to Bing. You will need to sign in with your Windows Live ID to access the webmaster center.

2. Enter the website URL and also sitemap URL (Good idea to have one!).

3. Next step is to verify your website and this can be done either with XML verification or HTML meta tag verification. You can get more details from the help center.

4. Once your website is validated, you will see details like number of URLs indexed, any issues etc.

Bing also has a tool for AdCentre keyword Suggestions, but it crashed when I tried to install it. so I’ll try again later.

You will also need to do a similar thing with Google and Yahoo.